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NGINX web server company gets $3M funding

The popular open source NGINX web server is going commercial as NGINX Inc, with an open core model and $3M of funding from BV Capital, Runa Capital and MSD Capital. The NGINX company was set up in July, co-founded by Ivan Sysoev, the software's creator. NGINX the webserver has, according to NetCraft, gained 8.5 per cent of total webserver traffic and, according to the company, has users in 20 per cent of the top thousand busiest web sites, including Zappos, Groupon, Hulu, WordPress, Dropbox, SourceForge and Facebook.

Created in 2004 to serve the needs of sites run by Rambler, the Russian search engine and web portal, the BSD-licensed NGINX, short for Engine-X, is efficient at serving static content, and can deliver dynamic HTTP content using FastCGI handlers. Internally, it has an asynchronous event-driven architecure which, under load, tends to offer more predictable performance than Apache's threaded/process architecture. NGINX can also act as a software load balancer and reverse proxy server.

On the issue of using an open core model, company co-founder Andrew Alexeev said that the company was not planning to close functionality in the open source project, but was going to address functionality that smaller companies don't need. Because of NGINX's modularity, it would be possible to do that on top of the code for the open source server and keep only one development track of the server, avoiding redundant development.